Chapter 5
FIVE
After listening to the voicemail options and learning the deputy’s name, Jerry Rouse, she left a message relaying that a body had been found at Midnight Ridge and that she was at the scene, waiting on the medical examiner and ERT to arrive.
While she waited for his return call or for him to show up—she didn’t know how things worked around here—she studied the scene with a detective’s eye.
The broken pink and white beaded bracelet bore letters and almost looked childlike.
She shifted the letters around in her mind and came up with Siri or… Iris. Hmm, was that the girl’s name?
Body face down, consistent with a jump. Broken bones, obvious. Blood loss severe and not surprising with the height of the jump. And she definitely smelled of whiskey and a lot of it.
The multitude of black crow feathers beneath the girl disturbed her. As she studied the feathers, she realized some of them were laid out in a pattern like a bird’s wing.
The sound of an engine in the distance cut into the night, and she walked over to the parking lot. A local Mystic deputy’s car was parking, the driver cutting its lights as he got out.
In the silhouette of the full moon, she saw a gangly man in a deputy’s uniform and a thick gray coat stalking toward her, a scowl on his rugged face and unshaven jaw like some kind of mountain man facing a standoff with a wild creature, not a fellow investigator.
He also looked pissed.
“What the hell is a detective from Crooked Creek doing in my neck of the woods?” the man barked.
Ellie bit back an agitated response. She knew it was the middle of the night and they were all tired, but wasn’t he at all concerned that another death had happened on his mountain?